MONTREAL — Immigrants are often seen as a problem. The Parti Québécois government’s proposed expansion of Bill 101 on Wednesday, for example, treats them as a linguistic challenge. And popular resistance to “reasonable accommodation” — the Hérouxville syndrome — springs from the idea that they represent cultural pollution.

Of course, public opinion is all in favour of immigrants when it comes to their tasty restaurants. Or when it comes to the boost they give to the economy by buying things.

Yet last week another study showed that it was significantly harder for immigrants to find work in Montreal than for their peers with similar credentials in Toronto or Vancouver (and inability to speak language is not always the reason, as the high jobless rate among francophone Maghrébins shows).

We already know that immigrants, or the children of immigrants, are disproportionately represented among the ranks of the top graduating students in high schools, CEGEPs and universities. We’ve also noticed their under-representation in last spring’s student protests — they were too busy studying.

But here are some facts that shed positive light on two other trends. The first is that the cohort of Quebec students of all backgrounds is observing a “cleaner” lifestyle than that of the cohorts that preceded it by a decade or more. The second trend is that the children of immigrants are the inconspicuous leaders of this lifestyle.

Let’s look at four different comportments.

Drug use. A massive survey of students in 2010-11 in 470 public and private schools across Quebec finds that 26 per cent of those in Secondary 1 through 5 had used drugs (usually cannabis) in the previous 12 months; that’s sharply down from the 43 per cent that an earlier research had found in 2000.

Tucked away in this 250-page survey by the Institut de la statistique du Québec is an eye-opening nugget: Students whose two parents had both been born outside Canada were half (14 per cent) as likely to have used drugs as those whose two parents had been born in this country.

A separate study discerns a similar phenomenon among the 2,100 older students whom it surveyed at Concordia, Université de Montréal and Université du Québec à Montréal. Concludes the main author, Concordia’s Sylvia Kairouz: “Students born outside Canada were less likely to use any illicit drug compared to students born in the country.”

Sexual relations: The Institut’s survey finds that 37 per cent of high school students ages 14 and older have had sex. Different ways of data collection prevent comparisons with earlier years, says the Institut, but it does note this: The rate of births fell sharply from 14 per 1,000 women 15 to 19 in 1998 to just nine per 1,000 in 2010.

The survey also reports that only 24 per cent of students with two foreign-born parents had had sex compared with 40 per cent of those with Canadian-born parents.

Drinking: The Institut finds a decline in the portion of secondary-school students who report having consumed alcohol in the previous 12 months.

And, again, it finds less drinking among the children of immigrants.

The Kairouz study observes the same thing at university levels: “The prevalence of alcohol consumption was significantly lower among students reporting to speak a foreign language at home.”

Smoking. The Institut notes a precipitous decline among secondary-school students who are regular smokers or beginners: The portion plunged from 30 per cent in 2008 to 10.5 per cent in 2010-11.

The rate of smokers with two foreign-born parents was 60 per cent less than those whose parents were born here.

To be sure, the Institut’s survey does not include dropouts in any of its research. Their inclusion would not have made things quite so rosy.

Let’s note, too, that the background of many members of gangs and organized crime vividly underscores the fact that many immigrants, or their children, are hardly angels.

Immigration represents the future of this future for Quebec. For me, the most surprising statistic of all is in another Institut report: In 1996, children less than five years old whose mother was an allophone accounted for 11 per cent of all Quebec children; in 2006, this had leaped to 17 per cent. Today it must be well above 20 per cent.

If those children’s elders are any guide, this growing wave will follow a relatively clean-cut, straight-arrow lifestyle.

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